Then tomorrow morning, we’ll have our monthly “split personality” report in order to update you on the Standard and Poorhousing picture. Remember, the housing recovery has been dramatic overs the past couple of years, just as any pulse is considered a zillion percent improvement from dead/flat-lined, so too, housing isn’t exactly pumping and jumping. Along with the rest of the green shoots, recovery, or whatever you want to call it, come to think of it.

So for that, maybe I need a mood stabilizer like Abilify or Seoquel, you think? That might help with Consumer CONfidence data, due out tomorrow morning, as well. Focus on the positive, we’ll mindlessly mantra-fy…

Then to cap off the week, we will have the latest unemployment data to digest with the hash-browns Friday morning. Depending on how the numbers roll, the range of expectations is somewhere the Devil’s Quadrangle between blow, nitrous oxide, Ambien and Oxy.

A check of the futures tosses the Dow down only about 20 at the open. But that doesn’t mean anything other than someone got to the medicine chest before I did.

But Pappy didn’t raise no fool: I look at the combined net worth of the Sinaloa gang, the Cartagena blow merchants, and the total market cap of all the publicly traded drug companies…well let me ask you something:

If you just drifted across a time-window from another dimension and did a quick econometric measurement of humanity on this rock, what would you say is our “business”? Going to the stars? Universal enlightenment? Peace, prosperity, and technology?

Not no, but HELL NO.

We are on a drug planet. And I’m on the verge of referencing Washington as a “cartel” no longer simply an “administration.”

You see, it’s what we do. We can say all freaking day long. But here’s Mr. Cynical’s Monday morning eye-opener.

The market cap of Microsoft is $366 billion. Apple: $584 billion.

Pfizer is $192 billion, and sure, they get smaller as you go down the list (Glaxo is only $117 billion, for example) but there are tons of drug outfits.

Drugs do get their share of blame for social ills, but is that really the reason for the rise in homeless in Denver? Could that have something to do with failed economic policies and systemic corruption? Naw…blame the drugs…you bet! Towering student loan debt with a lack of jobs while the Washington Cartel rubberstamps H1-b’s? Naw…must be the drugs!

Drug, drugs, drugs…it’s what we is anymore.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but when you take the trillion plus in legal pharmas and toss in what seems reasonably to be placed at $700+ billion today, and let’s not forget them tobacco companies which are pimping death in emerging markets, let me ask you again:

So I’ll ask again: What the hell business is this planet in?

Oops…forgot the booze companies…you starting to see why I’m standing by the medicine chest this morning?

And now you see why I may start referring to our Capitol’s functions as the “Washington Cartel?”

How it looks depends on where you stand. Me? I’m standing asides and looking befuddled. But this is precisely what the UFO guys would see and it’s probably why we haven’t been invited by Gazorpians to test drive spacetime transiting technology yet.

Bet?

The headlines this fine Monday argue rather starkly that we can’t even deal with the training wheels. And I’ve got even more proof..

More after this…

The Thrilla-Killin

Not that the planet doesn’t have a few places of interest besides our weird fascination with trading paper for drugs or all kinds.